Siri Is Definitely Sharing Your Data With Third Parties

Apple is listening. Better watch what you say.

Next time you ask Siri for directions to the nearest strip club, consider the consequences: Apple may just narc on you to third parties later.

That's according to Reddit user FallenMyst, who two weeks ago claimed that, after starting a new job with a company called Walk N'Talk Technologies, she found herself listening to Siri and Samsung Galaxy recordings from random customers. (FallenMyst's role requires her to listen to voice data collected from Apple and Microsoft users in order to check voice-to-text translations.) Here's how she described it:

"At first, I thought these sound bites were completely random. Then I began to notice a pattern. Soon, I realized that I was hearing peoples' commands given to their mobile devices. Guys, I'm telling you, if you've said it to your phone, it's been recorded... and there's a damn good chance a 3rd party is going to hear it.

"I heard everything from kiddos asking innocent things like 'Siri, do you like me?' to some guy asking Galaxy to lick his butthole. I wish I was kidding."

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It wasn't long before Motherboard reported that Walk N'Talk, which was not found online, was actually run by CrowdFlower, "a crowdsourced data mining company that pays low wages for people to do easy repetitive data analysis for various third-party companies," the reporter explained. After signing up for the service, the reporter saw for herself what FallenMyst had been talking about.

Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union, was disturbed by the revelation: "Consumers have a certain expectation about what's happening when they interact with a company," he told Motherboard. "People don't like it when they think they're talking to a computer and they're not, or vice versa."

"By using Siri or Dictation, you agree and consent to Apple's and its subsidiaries' and agents' transmission, collection, maintenance, processing, and use of this information, including your voice input and User Data, to provide and improve Siri, Dictation, and dictation functionality in other Apple products and services."

Questions remain—who are these third parties?—and not everyone may feel comfortable with the answers. But what we do know is how long Apple stores Siri voice data, and how. According to Wired, which reported on the story back in 2013, the data is shipped off to Apple's data farm for analysis, where it generates a random number that represents both the user and voice file. Six months later, Apple "disassociates" the user number from the clip, thereby deleting the number. The files are then stored for an additional 18 months, all for the sake of testing and product improvement.